Wild Boys vs. “Hard Men”

The following text is excerpted from chapter 5 of James J. O’Meara’s book The Homo and the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics and Popular Culture, forthcoming from Counter-Currents.

Many of today’s “alternative” Rightists aspire to a pre-modern, even Traditional worldview that they hope will return us to the vital sources of our civilization. But that is just a castle on a distant hill. In the meantime, we still live in the subdivisions of bourgeois conservatism, where all intellectual progress can be undone with a single wrong turn in a labyrinth of mental cul-de-sacs.

Issues touching on sexuality, family life, and economics particularly seem to set us off, for most American conservatives inherit their ideas of healthy Traditional society from the profoundly modern and anti-traditional heresy of Calvinism, which imprisoned eros within marriage and formerly free men, women, and even children in mines, factories, and workhouses.

When one looks through these lenses, the real sources of our civilization become invisible, for civilization begins not with the nuclear family, but the Männerbund; not with work, but with play; not with necessity but with luxury; not with modesty but with display. Thus I wish to deploy the phenomenon of dandyism to shock the bourgeois blinders off would-be Traditionalists.

I. Are We Middle Class Conservatives?

At The Occidental Observer, Elizabeth Whitcombe in “The Difficult Class”[1] lauds the supposed “strength” of the middle class, epitomized by its supposed “individualism,” and laments how global elites have tried to undermine it. Of course, one might question how “individualist” the middle class is, or whether, if so, that is a strength. Kevin MacDonald, for one, argues that the alien elites (you know who They are) are precisely promoting individualism itself to undermine White societies.

Whitcombe, however, has an odd idea of “individualism” since she thinks that, “In his Republic Plato recognized the power of middle class principles. Family loyalty, community participation, self-reliance, and prizing education are all things that help the individual resist the will of the State. Plato knew that a class of virtuous citizens needed these qualities in order to prevent the state from slipping into tyranny.”

I’m not sure any of this is particularly “individualist” or “middle class” as opposed to archaic Greek warrior virtue, promoted by pederasty and represented in public art by statutes of invincible male friends who resisted tyranny to the death, but whatever; at least she seems to admit that Plato must be pretty smart, since she wants to draft him for her cause.

Alas, our trust is misplaced; apparently, Plato is an untrustworthy ally, and reveals himself as . . . wait for it . . . “naïve”: “Plato naïvely thought that he could get rid of internecine conflict by extending the family relationship across an entire class—in other words, communal property and no nuclear family.”

Somebody is “naïve” here, but I don’t think it is Plato. Rather, Plato is quite aware of what he is about. In this “class” of Guardians, he is attempting to recreate the features, and thus the benefits, of a Männerbund, the male warrior groups that split away from exactly the “nuclear family” Whitcombe naïvely eulogizes, in order to create the higher institutions of the state and culture.

Ironically, many of the institutions that one thinks of as “middle class,” such as the Boy Scouts, the Little League, the Armed Forces, and the Church, etc., are in fact vestiges of such bands; that’s why women are obsessed with “gaining entrance” or, like Ms. Whitcombe, naïvely ignoring them and promoting the female cults of Family Values. That’s also why they are subject to Christian-inspired witch hunts for “homos.” (Why there, rather than in banks or hardware stores?)

At one time, Rightists from Hans Blüher to Julius Evola knew of such things, but today it’s all about Judaic Family Values.[2]

These are the Wild Boys that William S. Burroughs mythologized, which I have taken as my blog’s emblem; indeed, Burroughs’ mythology will crop up again in our examination of the next offending article.

II. Kurtagić’s “Hard Men”

Wild Bill Hickock

The very next day at TOO, Alex Kurtagić contributed “They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To.”[3]Here Alex treats us to a visit to a local exhibition, where photographs of some Olde Tyme factory workers (a pencil factory, if you will) produce an odd effect on our correspondent. Whitcombe’s middle class likely leaves him cold, but these filthy old codgers set his mind athinking in odd, unwholesome ways. He calls the Wife over and she concurs; these chaps, with their “hostile frowns, ice-cold blue eyes, and troglodytic beards and angrily scowling moustaches” are Real Men, and are sadly lacking today. In another article, Kurtagić pays tribute to the industrious Quakers, who played a prominent role in creating the kinds of factories that produced pencils, matches, and “Hard Men.”[4]

Right off, I have some questions here. For all their beards and stares, these are after all pencil factory workers, not coal miners. Secondly, would these Hard Men be spending their precious “free time” gazing nostalgically at old photographs, and even if so, would the Wife be along? It seems to me that when Men were Men, Women were Wives, and stayed home mending and birthing and boiling tripe.

Unhindered by such negativity, Kurtagić continues to drift in his reverie about the days when factory labor made men Hard, and even waxes nostalgic for the “muscular Christianity” and the Cult of Work that served as ideological cover for the mechanized enslavement of the English yeomanry.

Orwell already made similar observations on the degeneracy of British manhood in The Road to Wigan Pier, but formed a rather different, and more plausible, diagnosis. Observing the sorry specimens arrayed under a dreary sky for the funeral of King George (the only color supplied by the pink bald heads revealed when hats were doffed), he lays it first to the sacrifice of the physical best of a generation in the Great War, and thus the loss of their progeny; and moreover, the appalling conditions (filth, hard work, poor nutrition, overcrowding) of the Industrial Revolution that Kurtagić lauds!

The futile evil of WWI, and the evils of the factory system: more evidence that Orwell and Waugh were, as a recent dual biography argues, The Same Man? Certainly he’s more of a “conservative” here than Kurtagić.

Is this what the Right has become? Eulogizing Victorian factory slavery and the twisted troglodytes it produced? At one time, English Traditionalists saw these men as “a ruined race” (Tolkien), and thundered against the system that produced it. That Christianity produced and defended it is hardly a positive feature of the religion, as Kurtagić thinks, and most English Traditionalists who stayed Christian (Chesterton, Belloc, Gill, Eliot, etc.) fobbed it off on the Protestant deviation.

The medieval Church, steeped in Aristotle, was part of a continuous Western tradition, going back to the Greeks, which condemned work and promoted leisure as “The Basis of Culture,” in the words of Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, whose Leisure: The Basis of Culture, was a surprise bestseller in the 1950s when T. S. Eliot prompted his publisher Faber & Faber to put it out. Imagine, a Catholic bestseller!

Non-English, non-Christian Traditionalists such as René Guénon and Julius Evola were even more scathing. And why not? Modern “work” is the satanic parody of traditional craft, which, before it was destroyed by Protestant “work,” was an integral part of traditional society, each vocation appropriate to elicit the perfection of the laborer’s own nature (hence, caste) as well as to serve as a “support” for metaphysical and initiatory knowledge. The factory system, by contrast, treated “all men as ‘equal’” and interchangeable units to be worked at the stupidest tasks until the last ounce of strength was gone, and then tossed on the scrap heap.

Evola devoted two chapters of his post-war manifesto, Men Among the Ruins, to “the demonic nature of the economy” and its tin idol, work. As Troy Southgate summarizes it in his book Tradition and Revolution:

The emergence of capitalism has often been equated with the Protestant work ethic, and is here dismissed by Evola for the simple reason that labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence to an end in itself. It is not only the Right who are obsessed with work, of course, it is the Left too. One thinks of endless marches organized by the likes of Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party, during which the only objective is to enslave the proletariat to the employment system: “The most peculiar thing is that this superstitious and insolent cult of work is proclaimed in an era in which the irreversible and relentless mechanization eliminates from the main varieties of work whatever in them still had a character of quality, art, and the spontaneous unfoldment of a vocation, turning it into something inanimate and devoid of even an immanent meaning.” Evola sees this process as the very proletarianization of life itself.[5]

But what is all this to Kurtagić? Who cares for waxing airy-fairy about medieval crafts and vocations? Protestantism and Capitalism (the original “PC”?) produced these deracinated pencil-making Hard Men. Chesterton, Eliot, Guénon, Evola; not a beard among them! Nothing to tickle his fancy here!

IV. The Wilde Wilde West

Oscar Wilde

Many Rightist are surprised to learn that Evola admired the works of Oscar Wilde, at least in his youth, but it’s not hard to see why. Evola despised Whitcombe’s bourgeoisie, and Wilde was their great tormentor. And Wilde’s social thought, as epitomized in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” was part of the same “work should ennoble or not be done at all” tradition that would later be mined by such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Guénon as well as Evola himself.

As someone once said about Ayn Rand’s idealized portraits of industrialists, “she writes about industrialists as if she had never met one,” so with Kurtagić and his Hard Men, whom he only knows from photographs; one can only imagine what he would think of Wilde’s idea that work must be abolished because it is ugly and makes men ugly.

Interestingly, Wilde, unlike Kurtagić, actually met with miners, along with cowboys and other Hard Men of the West during his famous American tour. A fascinating article by Jan Wellington[6] gives an account of the remarkable encounters, where “Wilde both advertised and embodied the aesthetic movement with its scorn for middle-class Victorian life and the uglier effects of the Industrial Revolution,” a perfect summary of what Evola hated, while also summarizing what Whitcombe and Kurtagić want to preserve in the name of the Right.

Since Kurtagić extends his admiration to “the frontiersmen of American Old West,” let’s see what happened when The Aesthete met The Hard Men.

From the time Wilde disembarked in New York, Americans were surprised to observe that, despite his elegant hands and languid gestures, the Aesthete was a strapping young man who, offstage, ate and drank with gusto and spoke with genial frankness. They learned that even his oft-ridiculed stage dress of black velvet jacket, lace cravat, silk knee breeches, and patent leather pumps could be understood in terms of pragmatics. As Wilde explained, “When a man is going to walk or row, or perform feats which require a display of strength and muscle, the trousers are done away with and knee breeches are worn.”

The Hard Men or Wild Boys of the West were not bowed down under the twin curses of work and muscular Christianity that Kurtagić wants to press down on our brows. Indeed:

[T]hat quintessential westerner, the cowboy, enjoyed freedoms unique in Victorian America: intimacy with women outside of marriage, intimate (though not necessarily sexual) relationships with men, and even the playful donning of women’s garb. To this alternative masculine subculture, their eccentric trans-Atlantic visitor would have seemed uncannily familiar, and thus it is no surprise that at least some Westerners found space in their tradition of individualism for one whose masculinity was complicated by a “feminine” aesthetic and appearance.

This, of course, is the West that served William Burroughs as the basis for his Dead Roads trilogy. These Wild Westerners sound like they could just as well be called the Mötley Crüe or the Guns N’ Roses Gang.

Indeed, one aspect of that free Hard Man culture that Kurtagić, and his Victorians, might have found hard to swallow: the men took Leif Garrett (a relation to Pat Garrett?) as their model, not Thomas Arnold:

In truth, Wilde’s long tresses and outsized hats were not all that eccentric, for Americans had come to associate long hair on men with boldness and adventure. In the West, long hair distinguished masculine men like Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, and Buffalo Bill Cody. . . . The Denver Republican declared approvingly “that if placed in a mining camp dance hall, [the Aesthete] would pass for a real bold, bad man.

Wellington notes that the Hard Men placed value on three things, and they were not high in the value system Kurtagić promotes: fighting, drinking, and cards. This allows us to get an idea of how Wilde would score on the Hard Man meter (I suggest we designate the units as Kurtagićs, or Ks).

Fighting? Wilde? Sure, he was huge man in real life, although later some described him as resembling a “fat, white slug.” The lecture tour did not give any opportunities for fisticuffs, although he did make “a promising impression”: a reporter noted that he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.”

Drinking? “In San Francisco, he foiled an attempt by the Bohemian Club to ply him with liquor and prove him a ‘Nancy boy’; after out-drinking (and out-talking) them all, he was given a proud place in a group photograph of the club.”

Cards? “In the same city, he thwarted another attempt on his manhood by professing his ignorance of poker, bluffing bafflement, and then beating all challengers at the game.”

In short, “when I lit a long cigar,” he reports, “they cheered till the silver fell in dust from the roof . . . and when I quaffed a cocktail without flinching, they unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way a bully boy with no glass eye—artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could.”

As for the miners’ own opinions, the Leadville miners “cheered as Wilde drove a silver spike into the lode that would bear his name. Years after his visit, they recalled their guest with affection, one reportedly declaring, ‘[t]hat Oscar Wilde is some art guy, but he can drink any of us under the table and afterwards carry us home two at a time.’”

Driving a spike? That’s some real work there, Alex; I doubt your beloved pencil factory workers would find that an easy task. Twenty years making the same tiny motions with your hands is likely to leave you with a mean, suspicious visage, but isn’t really good for developing the biceps. No wonder they wore long pants; breeches would have revealed their pitiful shins!

What was the basis of this evident kinship of Oscar Wilde, the dandy and aesthete, with these Wild Boys of the Wild West? Simple: no matter how hard they may have worked, they did not allow their souls to be subjected to bourgeois economic necessity. Instead, their lives were dedicated to ideals and actions that transcended economic necessity: aesthetic appreciation and display, games and contests, chivalrous behavior, the unfettered imagination—in short, the wellsprings of real culture. The West is where the freest spirits in America escaped from the creeping blight of factories and tenements—until they hit the West coast, and modernity finally caught up with and consumed them in the end.

2. For the real history, see the works of Alisdair Clarke and Wulf Grimmson cited above in Chapters One and Two, as well as Wulf Grimmson, Male Mysteries and the Secret of the Männerbund, available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/lokisway.

25 Comments

“We need to aim at a society in which machines put us all out of work.”

Exactly. Even the Atlantis fantasies spoke of Automatons doing the work. Right now we have robotic technology can mimic every human movement and be remotely controlled. A centralized white society could utilize this with ease.

It was disappointing to see the ‘meds’ derided for their ‘lifestyle’ because as we see, there’s always a better slave somewhere (see China). As for becoming lethargic… well it’s usually the drudge workers that come home exhausted and can barely move. I’m reminded of the ‘Predator’ mythology where a technically advanced society became elite hunters as part of their ‘play’.

You want to be out of work? What the hell for? Anybody recall the Gyro Gearloose story (“Monsterville” by Carl Barks, 1961) who transformed Duckburg into a place run completely run by machines? Unexpectedly, everybody became lethargic and unhappy.

I’m not much of a metaphysical thinker so much of this writing flew over my head, but I believe James is right that the Buchanan style fascination with traditional, 50’s, nuclear-family American culture amongst many traditionalists is a dead end. It will prove insufficient as an adapting culture once we reach the post-modernity stage, and I doubt when the time comes that many White men will find themselves trying to resuscitate the white-picket fence.

Why? Because that would be emulating a culture that was in the end circumvented, hijacked, and pursued as a weapon against Occidental man. It was a wall of cardboard against Jewish cultural assault, ultimately the White man’s final racial and spiritual sacrifice for short term economic considerations, which dearly cost us our civilization’s longevity.

“I’m not much of a metaphysical thinker so much of this writing flew over my head, ”

Worry not: the premise is wrong.

«When one looks through these lenses, the real sources of our civilization become invisible, for civilization begins not with the nuclear family, but the Männerbund; not with work, but with play; not with necessity but with luxury; not with modesty but with display. Thus I wish to deploy the phenomenon of dandyism to shock the bourgeois blinders off would-be Traditionalists.»

What he has defined here is not civilization — remember: the city, the urban complex — but surplus masculine energy only. In spite of the all too neat and heroic histories of Romans and the like, Männerbünde do not “found civilization” because no one discrete social unit does so, and that because civilization is not a discrete event but a process.

This is also the failing of Matt Parrott’s “warlord harem” theory for the development of fortified towns, thus civilization.

Not luxury, but a convenient surplus of food energy.

I have to wonder how this concept Männerbund even found its way into the New Right. Far as I can tell, the vector was that awful “Aryan Futurism” blog, the author of which engaged in some heavy reality-redacting to serve his own weird private agenda.

Ultimately of course the term was torn from its context in Stig Wikander’s Der arische Männerbund: Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte, which as the title indicates was a small book on the Indo-Iranian warrior caste and its place in Indo-Aryan religion. Had nothing to do with danydism, homosexuals, shocking the bourgeoisie, etc.

Thence, the concept made its way into George Dumézil’s work, in particular Rituels indo-européens à Rome and Fêtes romaines d’été et d’automne, suivi de Dix Questions romaines — both wonderful books btw — wherein he describes, among other oath-based rituals of masculine display, the Lupercalia.

On the whole, I am suspicious of this trend in NR writers of fixating on small groups of males as the “foundation” of “society” or “civilization”. Strikes me as masculinist vanity. The Aryan war-band played a disruptive role in long-established civilizations: the Indus Valley (Vedic culture), Hatti (Hittite culture), Central Asia (Bactria-Margiana Complex), hither Pelasgian (Dorian / Hellenic), Old European (“Battle-Axe” culture, Tuatha de Danaan of Ireland), even later processes such as the German ascendancy to power at Rome post Völkerwanderung, and the Teutonic Knights’ northern crusade. I repeat: this is not a history of starting civilization, but of disrupting it. The Aryan war-bands are not creators; they are free riders into and upon it. (Ditto the brawling heroes of this essay.)

All of this seems to have been missed, or freely rewritten to flatter the vanity of the author. No offense.

Our “Mötley Crüe” and “Guns N’ Roses gangs” class (warrior class) have been neutered. People in the white nationalist movement never seem to realize how important alpha males are to a pack (race) of people when it comes to getting attention from females and inspiring and leading the other males in the pack. It never seems to occur to people in this movement that the drugging of our boys for aggressive behavior over the last several decades has anything to do with our destruction. White parents are much more likely to drug their boys for stuff like this while other parents (especially blacks) see pride in their boys being “macho savages”.

When a boy is put on these pills it depletes the chemicals (permanently) in his brain that produces testosterone (thats what calms him down). When the boy reaches puberty (the most important time of the boys life) his body begins to change, the bone structure in his face, the deepness of his voice, his body build and many other things. These things will develop to the extent of how much fuel (testosterone) the boy has to push the development, if his testosterone has been depleted then he want have the “fuel” to reach his full development that nature intended for that boy to have.

We never ask why theres no more Clint Eastwoods, Jeff Bridges etc. etc. in Hollywood or Tommy Lees, Nikki Sixxs, Robert Plants etc. etc. in music. I have read that 31% of American men under the age of 45 where given these pills when they were little and 36% of men in Europe. They have taken out the top 25% of our men, the alpha males.

Yes immaturity is common among pretty much everybody. The reason for this in my view is because black people have dominated our culture for the last 20 years and blacks have the maturity level of 13 year old white person, they set the glass ceiling for maturity, they keep us in a state of arrested development.

White men stop being dominate in culture after the 1980s. Blacks themselves acted more mature when white men were dominate in our culture.

What kind of an adult would name themselves snoop doggy dog, MC hammer, ice tea, ice cube? A child would.

1. Who’s going to maintain the physical infrastructure in this halcyon leisure society?

2. Cameraderie may get some people through the workday, but some jobs are so terrible that all you want to do at the end of it is go home and get drunk. I’ve worked at such a job. The stress is so bad that the employees doing it are filled with hostility toward each other. So they quit and more are hired and ’round it goes. No way can all work in any society be restructured to completely eliminate this.

Wouldn’t it be nice for everyone to live like Baron Evola, Oscar Wilde, etc. They have more in common with Pentti Linkola than would first appear. Zoned out, the lot of them.

The eternal problem of work: necessary for life and yet not always so spiritually enriching. Those who read the Art of Manliness blog would do well to search for the article posted on “drudge work.” While in the Traditional society, drudge work was shrugged off onto the sudra and outcaste groups, this isn’t exactly much of an option in the modern world. The wild boys did a lot of drudge work, but they managed to turn it into play. Perhaps that’s the line that is best taken for the modern world. The working man (in a factory or at a computer screen) does his drudgery, but turns it into play. He forges friendships and turns coworker into comrade (how different is that from the angst-filled office rivalry culture of so many bourgeois workplaces?). Personally, having had to do extremely boring work on a packhouse floor, I can say that comradery in the workplace was key to getting through the day. Moreover, the fact that the work itself is fairly simple allows one to even practice a sort of mental exercise, clearing ones mind of thought and simply focusing on the action, which struck me as resembling a sort of simple Dasein.

Alan Watts would of course have us enhance technology to replace the need to do unfulfilling work. And it is the case that many forms of technology today are becoming more personalized, more beautiful once again. I remember seeing a simple flash drive which had a marble design embedded into it, a feature which added a little beauty to what could be just a piece of useful plastic. Artisans making computer hardware. What once was, might well be again.

“Alan Watts would of course have us enhance technology to replace the need to do unfulfilling work.”

Greg has written here and in his book about Watt’s economic ideas, which were basically a kind of Social Credit systems, a la Pound etc. Thus, tech would free us, and the state would pay us for not working. Of course, today we have exactly the opposite idea: more and more are demonized as ‘useless eaters’ such as Romney’s 47%. Between outsourcing, tech, and phony paper-pushing jobs in bubbles [realtors, dot-bombs, etc.] there simply won’t BE any more jobs. Romney sneers, and Obama pushes antiquated ‘shovel ready’ ideas.

During the interim, he has the idea of turning drudge into playtime. Something which rather delightfully reminds one of the child engaged in pure destructive creation that Crowley uses to symbolize the spirit of his new age. What do you think, James? A wild boy’s drudge work?

Glad to see Dr. Josef Pieper get an honorable mention. His book Leisure: The Basis of Culture is a must read for those in the alternative Right. I would furthermore encourage my fellow Catholics spend more time with Pieper, Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, and Tolkien than with the assorted liberal nonsense that now passes as popular literature in most Catholic circles.

Best article I’ve read on here, to date. Thanks and I’ll pass it around. I often ponder, how does one, exactly, get out of this economy-driven lifestyle? We already try to consume as little as possible, but how does one gain self-sustenance in this day and age, especially if you don’t own land?

Many good points I must admit – all advocating a flawed hypothesis. Tolkien would be appalled to be put in defence on any such Wild Boys – his ideal society being based on Anglo Saxon Yeomany ruled by a modest Aristocracy supported by the Church. But yes, he agreed with you about “work” and so do I. No quarrel there at all. I liked the way you conflate this one issue with your main hypothesis. Well done – we will have use for men like you in the decades to come. We must learn to imitate the arts of the Enemy without becoming Him.

Wilde was a unique and tragic figure. Any who try to imitate him will just end up with the tragic side. His gifts were all his own. And yes a powerful man: the Bloods forced their way into his room to manhandle him at College. He bodily threw them out – and then invited them back in for a drink. That kind of strength gets you respect from such types. An average man would not be able to do that and would not get the same kind of respect while wearing weird clothes and mincing around. Ask Quentin Crisp. Quentin’s best defense was humor: when being beaten he apologized for offending “you gentlemen somehow”.

On Wilde, you agree with Yeats. In Tucci’s biography of Cram, as per my previous essay, he says that “one needn’t admire Wilde, much less Lord Douglas, to see the truth in the observation
Yeats made” : by refusing to run to the continent, as even his friends urged, Wilde even to his detractors “made of infamy a new Thermopylae.”

Actually, I can’t find Yeats saying this online, but there is this:

“Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queensberry had mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to acknowledge his wit, was now full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single man who considered him innocent. One old enemy of his overtook me in the street and began to praise his audacity, his self-possession. “He has made,” he said, “of infamy a new Thermopylae.” — The TREMBLING of the VEIL 1922

Yeats’ testimony of “cultivated London” having previously mocked Wilde, is not only at odds with the stereotype of Oscar triumphant before his fall [making for a very Christian myth] but makes an interesting contrast to the unspoiled reactions of the Colorado miners and San Francisco card sharps quoted above.

One of the most interesting recent articles on CC, and that is saying something! It is quite inspiring to see Oscar Wilde, whom I admire, linked in this way with New Right thinking.

To prove that Wilde was made of sterner stuff than the caricature image of the languid aesthete, you may also point to the Wilde trial: even when Wilde got the opportunity to flee, he stood his ground.

Unfortunately, prison did break Wilde’s spirit in the end. His famous “De Profundis” is in fact the neo-Christian blabbering of a broken man. His defiance has left him, and Wilde extols instead his sufferings as a divine way to teach him humility and make him like Christ. It is excruciating to read, and inspires in me a deep hatred of Christianity.

“Dennis wouldn’t stop the shemale act and we got tarred and feathered for being sodomites.”

Sunny is a cornucopia of implicit Whiteness [with occasional injnuctions to each other to ‘stop being so racist’]. The McPoyle brothers are clearly Wild Boys, while the McPoyle family as a whole exhibits every atavistic trait attributed to “those damned Micks.”